The Schoenberg Code: Chapter 4

˙˙˙pןoɟun oʇ sǝnuıʇuoɔ ʎɹoʇs ǝɥʇ ¿ɯıɥ ǝʞɐʇ ǝɹnʇuǝʌpɐ ǝɥʇ ןןıʍ ǝɹǝɥʍ ˙ƃɹǝquǝoɥɔs pןouɹɐ ɟo ɔısnɯ ǝɥʇ uı sǝnןɔ snoıɹǝʇsʎɯ uʍop ʞɔɐɹʇ puɐ ɹoʇɔnpuoɔ snoɯɐɟ ɐ ɟo ɹǝpɹnɯ ǝɥʇ ןǝʌɐɹun oʇ sǝıɹʇ ǝɥ sɐ ʞɔıp ˙ɹp ɹoɟ uʍop ǝpısdn uɹnʇ oʇ ʇɹɐʇs sƃuıɥʇ ”˙ǝpoɔ ıɔuıʌ ɐp ǝɥʇ“ s,uʍoɹq uɐp ɟo ʎpoɹɐd ɐ puɐ ɹǝsʍɐɹʇs ʞɔıp ʎq ןǝʌou ןɐıɹǝs ɐ 'ǝpoɔ ƃɹǝquǝoɥɔs ǝɥʇ ɟo 4 ɹǝʇdɐɥɔ oʇ ǝɯoɔןǝʍ
--- ----- -------- ----- ---

We looked like any other tourists in New York City, wandering through Central Park, gawking at the buildings as we headed for Lincoln Center. As we left the park behind us – and the intrepid officers of the International Music Police who were apparently now aware we were a trail of interest – we passed a great stone facade that reminded us of some great gothic pile more associated with Paris than America.

“The Hotel des Artistes?” Buzz said, reading the sign with obvious amazement. “I don’t know too many artistes who could afford to live here!”

“Well,” I demurred, “not the ones on our level, perhaps, Buzz...”

“So what do you expect to find at the library? A secret coded message from Arnold Schoenberg?” Tony was trying not to sound skeptical.

“I don’t understand the whole fascination behind Schoenberg’s music,” Buzz admitted petulantly. “Everything he writes sounds like it must be in some kind of code I’m not smart enough to understand. Well, except the earlier stuff: I like ‘Transfigured Night,’ that’s pretty...”

“Oh, so you just listen to music for what soothes you, something pleasant, something you can listen to like a musical fish-tank?” Tony sounded annoyed, like this was going to be more than a philosophical argument about aesthetics.

“Well, no, it’s not that,” he offered in an attempt not to dig himself in any deeper. “I like a lot of new music but Schoenberg – I just don’t get it. It all sounds like some big crossword puzzle with its Retrogrades and Inversions and rules about not using any one pitch until all twelve notes of a chromatic scale have been used and...”

I cut him off as we dodged dog-walkers headed toward the park: “But you like Mahler, right?”

“Oh yeah, I love Mahler,” Buzz enthused, suddenly excited to be on familiar ground. “Mahler is God, he puts me in a deep emotional world with those long ever-expanding phrases and sudden harmonic twists and... man, those climaxes just send me over the top!” He was beaming.

“But what were your first reactions to Mahler?” I pressed.

“Well, I admit I didn’t really care for it, at first, you know – I mean, it sounded too long-winded with phrases that never seemed to go anywhere and then suddenly in the midst of all this... this stuff was some climactic chord that just sounded so over the top...”

“So what changed your mind?”

“I figured maybe I was just listening to some bad performances. So I went out and bought lots of recordings and listened like crazy until his musical language became familiar to me. It was like a revelation, I guess... and... uhm... errr...“ he began stammering, then ended sheepishly under the glow of the epiphany I had been anticipating. “Oh, right... okay...”

The light changed and we crossed the street.

Buzz stopped in front of a shop window were they were selling TVs and radios as some audio piped out onto the sidewalk, sounding like a refugee from an old TV police show, made an ominous announcement.

“Also loose in the city, three presumably dangerous characters, two men and a woman. They are wanted for the murders of three conductors whose bodies were discovered this morning in various places in mid-town Manhattan.”

“Three?!” we all gasped.

“That’s right – three! Police found the bodies of” – there was slight pause in the delivery – “Hans-Heinz Schnellenlauter, Jean-Claude Plusvitefort and...” – another longer pause – “some Polish guy, all of whom were to be conducting concerts this evening in New York City.”

“Oh my gosh – could he mean Budzyka Szybkogromska?” I stammered in disbelief. She was one of the rising stars on the Polish new music scene.

“Yeah, that’s the one,” the voice continued. “Anyone sighting them should immediately contact the nearest city policeman.”

“I was supposed to do brunch with her tomorrow after her concert: she was conducting a chamber orchestra program of Penderecki, Panufnik and a new work by Marta Ptaszynska at Symphony Space tonight, the Three P's of Modern Poland! It was very difficult trying to decide which of their concerts to attend!”

The voice continued. “So, be on the look-out for two really cool-looking 20-somethings – a tall thin guy with reddish-blonde hair and a trim goatee wearing a spiffy open-collar off-white shirt and khaki pants and a slender woman with long black hair wearing a very stylish black pants suit with a silvery kind of short jacket who looks like she could be a model but is reputed to be a violist – and their ring-leader, a short rumpled middle-aged guy with gray hair and a bushy mustache and goatee who goes by the name of... Dr. Dick.”

“Hey,” I said a little too loudly, “I resent that stereotyping!” Buzz shooshed me just as the television set in front of us suddenly switched to a picture that took our breath away. There we were, the three of us – Buzz on the left, Tony in the middle and me, looking particularly rumpled, on the right – all staring at the camera in disbelief!

Then Buzz noticed, looking up at the corner of the window, “Oh wait, that’s just a surveillance camera on a closed-circuit monitor here and they must’ve just switched to it – see?” He lifted his arms in a kind of slow motion chicken dance, gracelessly mirrored on the television screen in front of us as if it were miming us.

Slowly we turned and walked away as nonchalantly as possible, hoping to blend back into the crowd before anybody would have noticed. The word was out – how long could it be before someone would point us out to the police? With any luck, something else would distract them for the time being, perhaps another episode of “American Idol.”

Tony decided we should take the side streets rather than Columbus Avenue, so we cut down 66th Street to get to the back of Lincoln Center. When we found the right entrance, no more than a fairly inconspicuous back door, we hurriedly entered, not without quick glances up and down the street to see if anybody noticed us. “Not too suspicious looking,” I thought.

Inside was a dim and rather grimy security lobby, nothing fancy, just a bare white-walled room, as white as years of smoke and dust would allow. A couple of chairs lined the one wall opposite a few faded photographs of the usual composers – Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and (curiously, given our previous topic of conversation) Mahler who had, after all, once conducted the New York Philharmonic. In front of us, sitting in a glass security booth with its bank of surveillance monitors, was the woman Schnellenlauter had always referred to as “The Gatekeeper.”

She looked even shorter than I remember from before, barely five feet tall if she stretched and was wearing three-inch heels. Her hair had turned almost white, now. She’s been at her post for probably over 30 years, I thought, even before Schnellenlauter had first brought me here to see some of the manuscript collections he enjoyed looking at when he was in town. Technically, this was a back-stage entrance at Lincoln Center that also led to the New York Public Library for Performing Arts tucked away between its larger neighbors. Many scholars and performers preferred using this entrance to avoided all the front lobbies and exhibit areas. I hadn’t been here since the library re-opened after extensive renovations a few years ago and wasn’t sure what may have changed.

But the Gatekeeper, with an incredible memory, had not changed and she seemed to recognize me almost immediately.

“Dr. Dick,” she said in a husky baritone voice, “You I haven’t seen in years! Back you are most welcome.”

“Hello, yes, it’s been at least... uhm, ten or more,” I said, trying to remember the last time I’d been there. I couldn’t even remember her name or even if she ever had a name. “I’ve come by to check something... for Maestro Schnellenlauter. He’s, uhm... detained right now,” I improvised, hoping Buzz wasn’t rolling his eyes, “and he wanted me to check one of the manuscripts upstairs for him.”

“Do you an appointment have? No? We require now for the reading room appointments,” she added, checking the wall of security monitors in her booth. “Well, you I think are in luck because empty is the reading room and Ms. Petri probably company wouldn’t mind. You I will let in.”

Buzz immediately started moving toward the door.

“Uh uh uh, not so fast. First, you must prove yourself... worthy.” Clearly she had come up with some kind of entertainment after years of boredom behind glass. “Of each of you will I ask a question. You, boy,” which immediately got Buzz bristling inside. There was a pause. Then she pulled herself up and smacked her lips in anticipation. “Name one major string quartet in which most of the basic pitch material is taken from an all-interval set – a hint I will give you: H, F, A and... B.”

Buzz thought for a split second, then erupted wildly, “Wha’??? Who the hell’d know anything as esoteric as that? Come on...”

“It’s Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, Buzz – elementary, my dear Blogster,” I added trying to calm him down.

“Dr. Dick.” The Gatekeeper sneered, then turned toward me. “What... is... your favorite color?”

“Blue!” That was easily proven, wearing a light blue denim shirt with the music school's logo, a dark blue T-shirt and faded blue jeans.

“Hey,” Buzz exploded again.

“Okay,” she said, “enter you may.” Looking at Tony, she simply said, “You, I can tell, need not any question: your innocence alone speaks opus numbers for you, if you had any idea what strength flows within you. But you will need to discover this, soon, and I would suggest you consider the numbers 1-3-2. You, also, may enter. And may the forte be with you.”

Then wheeling her head sharply toward Buzz she snapped, “You, young man – sit!” and she pointed to one of the chairs. Buzz sheepishly sat down as Tony and I passed through the elevator door that opened with a click and a hum. We were on our way upstairs.

“That was kind of creepy: what did she mean by all that? Was she always into fortune telling?”

“I’m not sure. She seemed more like the Delphic Oracle. Maybe the fumes from the subway have been getting to her.”

“I wonder what she meant by 1-3-2? And what was all that about the Berg Lyric Suite?”

“Oh, just old facts lumbering around in my brain from my grad-school days, though it was since then that one of my professors, Douglass Green, discovered a secret message in the piece that had been overlooked since the work was written in 1926. There was a manuscript of the Lyric Suite in a Vienna library that had a cryptic text included in the last movement's rough draft. He figured out it was actually the text of a poem, like a secret love song that was not included in the final version. A couple of years later, George Perle discovered a fully annotated copy of the Lyric Suite – it ended up in an attic in New Jersey, of all places – which had different colored inks highlighting lines and pitches here and there with the actual text written in under the different string parts, though it was never intended to be performed that way – he just absorbed this love poem into the string parts.”

“A secret message just for one listener? Something no one else could ever hear?”

“Right, no one else even knew about it, presumably, until 50 years after he wrote it. And only because of this copy he’d given to his beloved Hanna who’d inspired him to write the piece.”

“H is for Hanna, not Helene, his wife?”

“No, in this case the pitches H-F and A-B stand for Hanna Fuchs and...”

“Alban Berg, I get it! So their initials become significant pitches throughout the piece, then.” She was beaming with this discovery.

“This particular 12-tone row” – that series of pitches that forms the pitch-generator for the melody and harmony of the music – “is based on several four-note groupings: depending on how you transpose it, you’ll find H-F-A-B – or B-natural, F, A-and B-flat – in some order as a four-note group.”

The elevator door opened and we found ourselves in a spacious, well-lit but otherwise empty reading room, which I thought odd but over all good news for us: we wouldn’t be disturbed. Sitting at the desk was a woman of a certain age trying not to look a certain age despite the traditional librarian’s regalia she wore – harlequin glasses on a string hanging around a tightly closed high collar, hair primly pulled back in a bun, a name tag that probably also said “SHHH” on it. I could imagine her looking completely different in the privacy of her own home, otherwise unrecognizable from her work persona.

She stood up to greet us. “You must be Dr. Dick? Agnes phoned you’d be coming? I’m Gloria Petri, the assistant librarian on duty this morning? And though it’s highly irregular, I’m sure even without an appointment, I can help you with your research?”

She spoke with well-studied diction but with an affected question-mark punctuation to every phrase she spoke, as if she could appear younger if she at least sounded younger. She clearly needed to spend more time in the declarative state.

“Agnes - yes, of course.” I hadn’t even thought she had a name.

“Agnes Day, she’s very fond of Maestro Schnellenlauter? He was just here the other day, spent hours poring over the sketches we have for Schoenberg’s String Trio?” She twiddled her glasses as she spoke.

“Hours. I’m afraid I don’t have hours but he had, er... suggested I should look at this, too.”

“Ah well, I know he’s conducting tonight, but he had made an appointment for... well, 9 this morning?” She looked down at the large notebook open on her desk. “Perhaps he’s been detained?”

It was now well past 9:00, but I could hardly tell her it was unlikely the Maestro would be making it at all. “Actually, it was the Schoenberg Trio I wanted to check myself – would it be possible...?” I wondered how long it would be before she might hear the news.

“Since he was supposed to be here this morning, I’d already pulled the folder in advance? If you want, well... you can look at it until he shows up?” Gloria held out the badly tattered manila folder toward me. It was like an offering – a musical offering which I accepted graciously. She motioned us over to a table in a distant corner where we sat down to page through the loose sheets of brittle paper.

I thought it would be only photocopies, not the original, but this was a handwritten copy, not much neater than a rough draft would be, though I suspected the original draft would be at the Schoenberg Museum in Vienna if not at the University of Southern California when he lived in suburban Los Angeles, not far from Igor Stravinsky and where he occasionally played tennis with George Gershwin.

In hushed tones, suitable to a library, I was explaining to Tony how Schoenberg had come to write this piece, how he’d had what was apparently a heart attack, presumably as a side-affect of a new pill a specialist had given him for his fainting spells, and how later that night he seems to have died moments before a doctor – a different doctor, by the way – injected him with something called Dilaudid, I think, directly into his heart which then revived him. This was something he referred to jokingly as “my fatality." I wasn’t sure if it’s possible that he had actually died or if it’s what we’d just call a near-death experience, but he was almost 72 and it was very scary, all the same. In less than three weeks as he was recuperating, he began composing this string trio, finishing it a month later. He told his students the piece depicted his brush with death in music.

I showed her the opening measures and pointed out some of the little kaleidoscopic gestures that sound almost spasmodic, as if nerve fibers are bursting back into life, hesitantly at first, before longer lines – perhaps memories or the return of consciousness – begin to form. Here was a pattern that almost outlined an A-major chord... how this passage sounded almost waltz-like, and so on.

She laughed. “I thought you’d be pointing out the row forms like my old theory teacher, Professor Staub.”

“That’s only one way to look at it, sort of like going through Beethoven and identifying the pitches by whether it was the tonic, dominant or subdominant level of the scale and leaving it at that, as if that would unravel all you needed to know about the music.” That was when I noticed something, leafing through the first couple of pages. “Hmm, look at this,” I said, pointing to measure 74 on page 4, “notice anything unusual?”

“Such as...?” She peered closer, not sure what she should see.

Moving my finger up to the line above, directly at the viola part, I added, “like between here and here?”

“You mean the alto clefs?”

His usual method was to use an easily written box-like clef, parallel vertical lines with two parallel horizontal lines in the middle to highlight the middle-C. But here, for some reason, he changed to the more typical printed but more involved alto clef, what I called the ‘fancy’ clef (which looks more like a |B) rather than the kind I’ve always used, the much quicker to write |K-shaped clef.

“The way we found Schnellenlauter in the green room.” She shuddered at the memory. “Do you think that means anything?” She looked more carefully at the pitches. Then she chuckled. “I know it sounds funny, this being an atonal – well, 12-tone work, but could this use of the alto clef be the key to what we’re looking for?”

“Don’t know... but since clef means ‘key’ in French, this could just be the keystone that will help us solve the mystery of why Schnellenlauter – and the others, for that matter – were killed. But so many clues refer to the Fibonacci series and the Golden Section. I’m wondering if there’s something hidden at those places where we’d divide the piece by the Golden Section?” I flipped to the back sheet. “Measure 294. Hmm, I’m noticing lots of A’s and E-flats, especially in the very last measures. Mean anything to you?”

“E-flat is S, right? So A and E-flat – a tritone – would be A and S... his initials, Arnold Schoenberg!”

Her excitement made me smile. “Okay, you’re the math whiz: what’s the Golden Section of 294? Divide by the Golden Ratio, 1.618.”

“Uhm, okay... wait a minute... 181.7. There should be something in Measure 181 on maybe the fourth beat or so?”

We both started turning the pages back... and there it was.

Granted, it wasn’t what I expected to find but it was a significant find all the same. A yellow post-it note!

Just then, Tony’s cell-phone beeped and Ms. Petri glanced at us, peering over her glasses with disdain. Tony cautiously answered it. It was Buzz calling from the lobby. She handed the phone to me. I hardly knew how to hold it, I’m such a luddite.

“Houston, we have a problem,” he whispered cautiously.

Just then, Ms. Petri’s phone rang and she too seemed deep in conference.

Buzz was unable to explain before he was cut off. Darned inconvenient place for a dead zone, I thought! I handed the phone back to Tony as I noticed Ms. Petri walking toward us. Deftly, I peeled off and pocketed the post-it note, then closed the folder to hand it back to her. But she didn’t seem interested in that.

“Dr. Dick?” She hesitated before continuing, carefully choosing her words. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave?” Then she motioned silently toward a different elevator than the one we’d entered. When the door opened, there stood a very sheepish-looking Buzz and... a very upset Gatekeeper. Buzz shrugged his shoulders.

I figured the word must indeed have reached them and we were soon about to be turned over to the International Music Police. It was not the way I had wanted to be on television – I always thought my own show on PBS would have been preferable but those days seemed long over.

“Get in,” the Gatekeeper... I mean, Agnes said very curtly. “With me you have been not honest quite, I am afraid.” Ms. Petri stood behind us. We had no choice but to enter the elevator.

Who knew what Fate would have in store for us on the other end of the shaft?

To be continued...

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2009

The Schoenberg Code: Chapter 3

Welcome to Chapter 3 of "The Schoenberg Code," a serial novel by Dick Strawser, a parody of Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code.' The story continues...

--- ----- -------- ----- ---

We scurried through the back-alleys behind Carnegie Hall, quickly working our way into the flow of pedestrian traffic toward Columbus Circle and Central Park. It was now 8:52 and it would be easy to lose ourselves in the morning crowd. Odd that there were no guards posted at the back entrance of the hall, but then perhaps they weren’t expecting us to escape, either.

“Good thing they didn’t know some of these dressing rooms have common bathrooms,” Tony said.

“And how convenient this one had a door just around the corner from the one they’d locked us in. I wonder if the guard even heard anything.” I also wondered if the sergeant had actually gone back to the murder scene. So far as they knew, we had no idea we were being suspected, not that finding the door locked would’ve been such a big clue.

“We could've just as easily crawled out through the bathroom window, Dr. Dick.” Buzz always had a sense of adventure, no matter how misplaced.

“Sorry, Dr. Dick doesn’t do windows, especially ones that aren’t on the ground floor.”

“Aww, piece of cake,” he said as he pretended to cuff me on the shoulder.

“Unfortunately, too many pieces of cake have passed through these lips,” I said, pretending to nurse the pretend bruise his pretend cuff would probably have caused. “I would’ve been wedged in so tight, it would be up to you guys to solve this mystery without me. And also to prove I didn’t kill anyone recently, either...”

In the meantime, we had clues to solve and, speaking of cake, food to find which, you’d think, this being New York City, should not be such a big deal.

Buzz went off to forage among the park’s many hot dog stands while Tony and I settled on a quiet bench under a large beech tree set back several yards from the path. I scribbled some ideas down on the note pad, wondering if Inspector Hemiola would add to my crimes petty theft of police property.

“So, who wrote Opus 45s? Something that might have a secret message in it, I’m guessing,” I asked Tony. “We can probably rule out things like Brahms' ‘German Requiem’?”

“What about Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, his last piece? Isn’t there some secret quotation in there?”

“Let’s see, there’s the standard ‘Dies irae’ chant which he quoted in almost everything he wrote – I’ve always thought it odd someone so Russian should have been so captivated by something so Catholic but obviously it had a very deep meaning for him. There’s also a quote from his liturgical setting of the ‘All-Night Vigil’ which has a kind of valedictory feel to it and very curiously something from his first symphony which no one would ever have recognized as a quotation.”

“Why was that,” Buzz asked, sitting down beside us with an armful of hot-dogs which he proceeded to distribute among us.

“Well, first of all, after that disastrous premiere sent him into a creative tailspin for, like, three years when he was a young man, he destroyed the score: no one had ever heard the work since that one-and-only performance, so it must have been something he did for personal reasons, forty years later. When you consider the ‘motto’ of that failed symphony was a biblical quote by way of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, ‘Vengeance is Mine – I will repay,’ it's a rather personal quote, when you think about it, figuring he probably was writing his last piece, then...”

“Vengeance is mine – Dies irae, day of wrath, day of judgment. Hmmm, I wonder... Do you think that's why Rachmainoff used that “Dies irae” motive the rest of his life in practically every piece he wrote? As if he were always looking for vengeance on that horrible moment early in his life?” Tony was looking askance at the mound of salsa on Buzz’s hot dog and wondered what kind of vengeance he would have to deal with, considering there was probably a chase scene in our immediate future.

“Or used it to remind himself that he had, after all, become famous despite the hateful critics who'd consigned his first major effort to hell? That some day he would meet them again but now he could laugh at them? Hmm, possible...” So much was open to conjecture, I supposed: who knew what he thought, himself. Still, there had to be a reason that theme showed up in his music time and time again, if not outright, very subtly.

Buzz sat back, holding the hot dog out in front of him for us to admire. “Yes, my friends, life is not like a box of chocolates: it’s more like a jar of jalapeño peppers – what you do today, tomorrow might just burn your a–”

“As you were saying, Buzz – and, well, thank you for that bit of insight, too – but we have some work to do here. You’re the one into transposing: work on this line from the one Fib: CEGUFQTJVMUNP.” I handed him the note pad and he studiously tried to apply the art of whole-step transposition and the Rule of 12 to its thirteen letters without applying any of his hot dog.

Tony began helping me on trying to make sense out of the eels – Buzz looked over wishing she was instead helping him.

“Why do you think he’s being so secretive? What could he possibly know that someone would kill him for it? And why, for that matter, would anyone kill Plusvitefort, too? What would they both have known that this guy would kill them for it?”

“I wish you had more answers than questions, Tony. I don’t really know: I hadn’t even thought about Plusvitefort, yet. One solution at a time, now, okay?” I pointed to the puzzle in front of me. “Eels...”

“You said it referred to the Hungarian immigrant in a Monty Python sketch. With all this stuff about Fibonacci numbers and Divine Proportions, do you think he means Bela Bartok? He used those ideas a lot in his musical forms.”

“Except Bartok didn’t use opus numbers... what is Bartok’s Opus 45?”

“Got it,” Buzz said, proudly handing me his assignment, “not that it makes sense, but hey, I just work here...”

A L K H OS C N S T R D E

“Well, you’re right about that, Buzz, it doesn’t: try it by seven,” I said nonchalantly. It almost sounded like I was just trying to keep him busy.

“Why seven?”

“It’s the other scale,” thinking seven pitches in the classical diatonic scale – say, C Major – as opposed to twelve in the all-chromatic scale. “I remember him saying sometimes he’d use that, but I’m not sure why.” I wasn't going to confuse them by saying maybe it's by eight, instead, considering the octotonic scale is something many composers have also used on occasion.

“Maybe it's a tonal composer,” Tony said brightly, “with a 13-letter name in three syllables?”

“Okay, try this,” Buzz offered. “Looks more promising. Not that I can think of Malcolm Arnold’s Op. 45, off the top of what's left of my head...”

A R N O L D S S K E T C H

“Arnold’s Sketch!” I laughed. “Not Malcolm Arnold, but Arnold Schoenberg – and his Opus 45 is the String Trio. I should’ve known, it’s practically an obsession with Schnellenlauter. Well, was...”

“And presumably continues to be,” Tony quipped, “even posthumously. Just the other day he was telling me it was something I should be playing. I’ve never even heard it!”

There was a wistfulness about her tone of voice, as if “just the other day” was already deep in the realm of nostalgia. It certainly was for me: that would be before I’d come to New York and gotten pegged for murdering two famous conductors!

“Funny, too – thirteen letters.”

“Why funny,” Buzz asked, gathering up the remains of our hasty lunch and disposing of them in a near-by trash, already overflowing by midmorning. I noticed the squirrels were eying us up. Apparently, not just squirrels, though.

“Schoenberg was triskaidekaphobic. Born on Friday the 13th, he was afraid he’d die on a Friday the 13th. And eventually, he did - in fact, he even died before he wrote this trio, so...”

“Before!?” Tony seemed shocked by the possibility. Buzz was once again clearing his throat.

“Schoenberg had something like a heart attack and was technically, clinically dead when the doctor injected something directly into his heart, bringing him back to life. As soon as he was able to, he began writing this trio, kind of a musical souvenir of the experience. I suspect we should go take a look at it,” I suggested, noticing Tony’s growing uneasiness.

“And quickly, I think, Dr. Dick,” Buzz added. “I assume word must have gotten out. If you haven’t gotten the feeling people are looking at us, perhaps you haven’t noticed a group of policemen who just walked into the park down there?”

“Ah, no, I hadn’t. Then it’s time we exit stage left – and visit the Gatekeeper.”

“The gatekeeper?” Tony didn’t sound reassured.

We blended back into the crowd and worked our way toward Broadway. “Next stop,” I said, “the library at Lincoln Center.”

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Nepomuck smashed his head against the door jamb.

“G’aah! How could they each have lied to me! They each told me the same exact thing!” He cursed under his breath.

He had just received a phone call from The Serpent who hissed that he had, unfortunately, failed to find the truth after all. They had sent an agent into the Musikverein, following what Nepomuck had told him, but the only thing they found under the bust of Beethoven was a small stone inscribed with a motive from his Op.135 string quartet, famously set to the words ‘Muss es sein? (Must it be?)’ – flipping the stone over, he had expected to find Beethoven’s own answer, ‘Es muss sein! (It must be!),’ perhaps with further instructions to locating the secret but instead found the correct notes inscribed only with the wrong words: “Es nicht sein! (It is not!)”

“Sssssomeone’s idea of a sssssick joke, don’t you think, Nepomuck? And for thisss, three famous conductors had to die? Ah well, but perhaps you will be able to redeem yourself yet. We shall ssssee.”

And with that, The Serpent had cut the connection abruptly.

Once again, Nepomuck tightened the A-string around his thigh and once more felt the soothing pleasure of his blood flowing down his skin. The phone rang again, but this was his other phone: the Serpent had given him one just for his calls, only; the other phone, which played the Pachelbel Canon, he used for friends, for regular business like gigs and calls from his mentor who at this moment was probably on his way back from a very important meeting with the board members of The Penguins of God in Vienna. He was tempted to let the phone continue to ring. He loved the soothing sounds of the Canon. He also knew he could identity his real friends by those who complained when he answered the phone too quickly and those who complained he hadn’t answered it quickly enough. That is, if he had any friends. As usual, it turned out to be Charles Leighton-Quackerly: Nepomuck very rarely got calls for gigs anymore.

“Yes, master, I have failed but it was not for want of effort. They lied to me: they deserved to die.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Nepomuck, you did what you had to do and they deserved to die anyway. It happens to all of us, eventually, you know.” The slightly fussy, matter-of-fact British accent underscored the often venomous reviews he wrote that appeared in print and on-line around the world, always castigating performers today for not being good enough, never as good as the past greats, not to mention composers today for having lost “the way,” as well as audiences for rewarding indifference and being too easily snowed by empty showmanship rather than true artistry. “But I may have news for you, so keep yourself prepared, shall we say? Hmmm?” He said nothing of how the meeting went in Vienna: that would come later, perhaps.

“Yes, master,” and Nepomuck put the phone away with a reverence of friendship for a man who could be both a hard taskmaster and a gentle guiding spirit that helped give him meaning. It was Leighton who took him out of that awful music school in Edinburgh where he’d spent years playing a violin far too small for his massive frame and gave him instead a viola. Then he gave him the White Viola and with that further gift came the one special purpose of his life: as part of the organization that was destined to protect Classical Music from all that is ugly, Nepomuck now answered to a higher calling, to bring great art back to the beauties of Mozart and Beethoven that had long been lost, in particular through the heresies of The Beast himself, Arnold Schoenberg, the man many believe single-handedly destroyed beauty in music.

After Leighton had given a talk at Nepomuck’s school called “Why You Don’t Like Schoenberg,” he felt compelled to go up to him afterwards and volunteer for the cause. Later, when the speaker was being attacked by a small group of deluded young pro-serial radicals on his way out of the lecture hall, it was Nepomuck who sailed into their midst, fists and knees flying until the alleyway was littered with the broken and wailing bodies of these effete but otherwise ineffective intellectuals.

And with that, Nepomuck found a home. As an orchestra player, now, he could militate from within the ranks of performing musicians against the inclusion of new music in symphonic programs, proselytize among his colleagues to subtly undermine the maestros during performances of new music, make comments to the local press when he had the chance about the evils of new music. Dressed in the traditional tuxedo of his office, he had quickly become one of the most devout members of the Penguins of God.

He had not always been named Nepomuck; in fact he could no longer remember what his real name was before Leighton had taken him in – probably Fred, or something common like that. He took his new identity, by way of revelation, from the student of the Divine Mozart, Johann Nepomuck Hummel, whose “Fantasy for Viola and Orchestra” he was working on shortly before he joined the organization Leighton’s own mentor had founded back in the 1950s. If his own devotion were to be rewarded, Nepomuck saw himself as the next-in-line, taking the Penguins of God further into the New Century.

And then there was the White Viola, his wonderful instrument. It was sometimes known as Il Volpe bianco because of its ‘wolf tone,’ something that many stringed instruments had, a note that sounded harshly and needed either special care when playing or some kind of mechanism to correct. Usually they were mysteries, a cipher, some structural anomaly that often rendered otherwise fine instruments useless. But this viola, with its odd whitened finish, possessed a special mystery, an anomaly so incredibly awesome, it proved in the right hands – or wrong hands, depending on your view of evil – to be a lethal weapon.

Antonio Stradivari is one of the best-known names in music, an 18th-Century maker of some of the most valued violins in the world, some of them selling today for millions of dollars. Though he made over 500 violins, he completed only twelve violas. The White Viola is the unfinished, unlucky 13th viola from his workshop and it got its creamy white finish from a fumbling apprentice named Ruggiero di Pastafagiole who unwittingly had dropped some of the cheese from his lunch into the varnish pot while applying the first coat to its delicately sanded wood. Stradivari, feeling his work had been ruined, abandoned the instrument and the varnishing was never finished. Years after his death, it was sold as part of a package to a violinist in Milan, Nicolo Mascarpone whose wife, Ricotta, had just discovered the art of decoupage. She took the viola, since it was not worth much in its present state, thinking it would look good as a decoration on the wall of her father’s cheese shop, and covered it with labels of some of the shop’s best-selling products. There it hung otherwise untouched for generations until the family emigrated to America in the 1890s.

In 1925, cousin Pecorino Fontina and his brother Enrico moved the family business to Rochester, NY, opening a new shop across from the newly founded Nazareth College, a shop they called “Cheeses of Nazareth,” when Enrico’s daughter, likewise named Ricotta – is history not an amazingly vibrant recycler of ironies? – unpacked the box with this white viola in it. Having recently begun studying the violin, she cleaned it up, put new strings on it and began to saw away at it night and day. It was then she realized that its smooth tone – “delicious,” her teacher had called it – was probably the result of the decoupage which also explained why, after the instrument warmed up, it smelled redolently of various blended cheeses.

And then she discovered the insidious wolf tone, at the octave point on the lowest open C-string. When combined as a double-stop, two notes played at the same time, with the same pitch on the adjacent G-string, it amplified the “wolf” considerably. When played slightly out of tune – just so – the sound became even more painful. Following the suspicious deaths of several members of the Fontina family, Ricotta and the instrument disappeared. There were several, mostly underground and presumably short-lived owners of the instrument in a short amount of time before it quickly gained notoriety as the White Viola or Il Volpe bianco, the White Wolf.

Most recently it had fallen into the hands of Charles Leighton-Quackerly who entrusted its care and usage to the more nimble hands of his faithful Nepomuck and thus had sent it out into the world as the chief weapon of the Penguins of God.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

As we walked along the streets of New York, I mentioned another of Schnellenlauter's puzzle passions. It was bad enough he had, at times, been a veritable Uncle Rebus, sending me puzzles cut out of letters and images from the newspaper, but for a period of time, he had been fascinated by anagrams, especially of composers' names. He was disappointed that his own name yielded only “SUNNIER HAZEL ENCHANTS HELL” but he delighted in pointing out Gustav Mahler's name came out “M. RAVEL'S A THUG” or that Ravel's was “VALIUM CAREER.”

It was good to laugh, despite being surrounded by this sense of violent death and the impending thought of soon being surrounded by the police. Buzz said, “Well, at least it helps kill the time.”

Tony groaned and poked him in the ribs. “No points for bad puns.”

“Oh,” I said, remembering one more of Schnellenlauter's anagrams, “Claude Debussy is 'BUSY SCALE DUDE.'” Dmitri Shostakovich, remembering our recent discussion of his musical monogram, had come up “OH CHRIST, A KID VOMITS.” We all laughed.

“Then Mozart would be... uhm,” Tony hesitated (you could see her checking it out in her mind's eye), “A LITTLE GERMAN WALTZ GOD.”

I was going to add that his father Leopold was OLD ZEALOT ROMP when Buzz mockingly protested, “but that's Johann Strauss!”

“No, he's... er... 'SON'S RASH JUNTA.'” Tony was proving to be very adept at this.

“Senior or Junior?” Buzz got out the note pad again and scribbled for a bit while we waited for another street light to change. “That makes Alban Berg a 'RABBLE NAG'...” Buzz was getting into the spirit of the game.

“And, lest we forget,” I added proudly, “Arnold Schoenberg comes out 'BACHELOR NERD SONG,' though that's spelling the O-umlaut as O-E...”

“Ah, but Antonio Vivaldi is a 'VAIN VIOLIN TOAD' – I can't wait to share that with my violist friends.” Inevitably, there would be yet another performance of The Four Seasons in her future – if she had a future.

Suddenly, I said “No, not that way, let's turn here.” Seriousness had suddenly replaced levity.

“But why are we going to a library? Why didn't we just stop at Patelson’s to buy our own copy of Schoenberg’s Trio – can we take the one out of the library if we need it?” Tony asked breathlessly as we trudged through the crowd.

“Why are we going to a library at all,” Buzz wondered. “Shouldn’t we be trying to get out of Dodge?”

I rarely missed a chance to visit Patelson’s Music Store, just behind Carnegie Hall – it was the Best Little Score House in Town – but I pointed out to Tony that the coded message specifically said “Sketch” and that might mean something different from the printed edition. There could be something there that did not exist in the final copy, perhaps a passage that the composer later changed or maybe a coded message he later suppressed.

And we were still wondering how many eels you can fit into a hovercraft. But we were about to find out, soon enough.

To be continued...

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2009

The Schoenberg Code: Chapter 2

Welcome to Chapter 2 of "The Schoenberg Code," a serial novel by Dick Strawser and parody of Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code.' The story Continues...

Stepping back from the body, Nepomuck slowly cleaned off his viola and returned it to its case. Once again, the instrument had worked its evil magic. He knew the viola alone would probably not kill a conductor used to hearing bad notes from viola players much of his career (he may even have become immune to them over the years). There might only be 20-30 minutes before the effect of the White Wolf wore off, if it didn’t kill him outright. But there wasn’t time to wait: there were footsteps in the hall, possibly a guard making rounds to make sure everyone had left the building following the concert.

There was a quick rap on the door. “Maestro? I’ll be locking up in ten minutes.” But he walked on without waiting for a response.

Nepomuck knew there wasn’t much time: he then quietly took a gun out of a side compartment in the case, applied the silencer and shot the body twice in the chest - pfwwp! pfwwp! - before unwinding an extra C-string which he wrapped tightly around the conductor’s neck. As the coup de grace, he took a syringe out of the rosin compartment, held it to the light to check that everything was ready, then knelt beside the body, injecting its deadly poison into the wound made by the C-string.

“My work here is done. I have the information, just as I suspected. They all said the same thing.” He sniffed the air with a great sense of satisfaction and smelled the familiar whiff of cheese. “But now I am hungry.”

He was always hungry after playing The White Viola and contemplated a big plate of lasagna as his reward. He latched the case tightly, straightened his tie and flicked off the light. The guard, should he return, would assume the maestro had already left. No one would discover the body until the cleaning crew would arrive next morning. Being a Saturday, with any luck they might even be late. He could be on his way to Vienna, by then.

He shuffled off down the dimly lit hallways, passing the now darkened green room, hoping to avoid the guard. He would explain that he was late leaving the orchestra’s dressing rooms but he could not risk being seen leaving the hallway where the conductor’s dressing room was. Still dressed in his tuxedo after the concert, he was too memorable a figure to be easily forgotten, with his frizzled blondish-white hair and pierced eyebrow. Being well over six feet tall and 280 pounds didn’t help make him inconspicuous, either. Maybe he should've changed into street clothes. But luck was with him. He made it to the back stage door without being seen.

He thought.

He loosened his tie, began to unbutton the shirt-front, then slid the jacket off, folding it jauntily over his right arm, carrying the large viola case in his left hand. Lumbering off toward 7th Avenue, he looked like any other classical musician finishing the night after a gig. He turned left and after a few blocks found Gioacchino’s Trattoria, an all-night Italian restaurant. Nodding at the pretty girl smiling behind the cash register, he slipped into a booth and ordered a large helping of the Florentine Lasagna special before plodding off to the rest room with his viola case at his side.

Once the man in the stall slipped away after furtively glancing at the large-bodied man trying to look nonchalant by the sink with a large instrument case resting up-ended against his leg, Nepomuck went into the stall. Under his tuxedo shirt, he wore his favorite t-shirt with the image of a famous cartoon penguin on it, a shirt made especially for him out of stiff goat’s hair which rubbed angrily against his skin. He tightened the gut A-string tied around his upper right thigh so that it cut more deeply into his skin. He could feel the blood begin to trickle on his thickly muscled leg once again. It felt good. He pulled up his trousers, tucked in the shirts, carefully washed his hands and quietly returned to his booth where a steaming plate of lasagna awaited him.

But first he said a silent prayer, mouthing words that no one there would have understood. He placed his large hands on the table, then decided before he could eat, he must make one very important call. Taking the cell phone out of his pocket, he punched one button – on this phone, there was only one number he could call – and waited till a sleepy voice answered after only four rings.

“Yessss?” The voice, despite the malevolent lingering on the ‘s,’ sounded sleepy but eager. Nepomuck knew in London it was after 4am but also knew his call was anticipated. He recognized the voice of this man known only as The Serpent and figured perhaps he had dozed off while waiting. Some things could not be hurried.

“It is done.” There was a pause. He could hear a sigh on the other end of the phone.

“You have the information?”

“Yes. Just as I suspected. They all said the same thing before they died. It’s hidden beneath the bust of Beethoven in the maestro’s dressing room at...” (he paused for the effect) “the Musikverein in Vienna.” His voice was almost toneless and lacked any sense of triumph.

The recipient of the call, however, reacted otherwise. He was both indignant and amazed. “In our very midsssst,” he hissed, the ‘s’ in ‘midst’ drawn out almost like a snake’s. Clearly, he was appalled that for perhaps a century or more, the secret they had all been trying to suppress lay hidden in the heart of their own domain.

The only thing Nepomuck minded was being cheated out of getting his hands on it himself. He knew another agent would probably be sent to the famous concert hall, not him. He wanted to present it to his mentor himself, but he knew now this would be unlikely. He had been disappointed when all three maestros, who happened to be in New York all at the same time, told him it was actually in Vienna. It made sense, but it seemed auspicious they should all be performing in New York City the same night. If it were here, he could lay claim to it himself before the sun rose. Now three concerts would have to be canceled tomorrow night: their conductors were all dead. But that was in itself a certain satisfaction for a man who spent much of his life playing in orchestras.

He signed off with his call, put the phone away, then looked at the plate of lasagna that was getting cold sitting there waiting for him. The restaurant played nothing but music by Rossini. The pain around his thigh increased as he repositioned himself in the booth but only now did he dive into his late-night dinner. It was all good. He had worked hard and wanted to enjoy himself: later, he would practice Bach for three hours. Maybe four.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

We sat in the dressing room, staring at the note pad in front of me. It made no sense, even when I divided the string of seemingly unrelated letters into actual words.

MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS

Clearly, I had made a stupid mistake somewhere. I kept going back to the original line, then the “transposed” line. Perhaps I had miscounted, using the Rule of 12. Perhaps it wasn’t the Rule of 12 I needed to apply? What, if anything, was Schnellenlauter trying to tell me?

“You don’t think he was just creating an elaborate joke, do you? It almost sounds like something out of Monty Python...” Buzz was clearly disappointed.

“Wait, you’re right. It IS out of Monty Python! I always thought it odd such a dignified and serious man as Maestro Schnellenlauter enjoyed the antics of that British comedy team. After he had seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he often sent me anagrams that would turn out to be lines from the film, like 'a moose once bit my sister' or...” Realizing it might embarrass Tony whom I’d just met, I decided to skip the scene at Castle Anthrax.

“We’re not going to be looking for the Holy Grail, are we?” Tony moaned. “I was hoping for something simpler than that.”

“Schnellenlauter often recited whole scenes of it from memory – the French Knights or the scientific explanation of how coconuts might have ended up in Britain... Yes, I think this might be correct after all.”

Not caring to admit they were unfamiliar with Pop Culture before they were born, nor wanting to embarrass me further and make me feel older than I already felt, both of them looked at me with obvious anticipation for the explanation.

“Okay, in one of the skits, a newly arrived Hungarian, dressed in a bowler hat and raincoat, walks into a London shop and reads lines from a Hungarian-English phrase book that is clearly all wrong. Nothing corresponds to what it means. At first the store clerk is helpful, trying to figure things out with various pantomiming, but as the lines become more risqué, the clerk calls in a policeman who arrests the man and hauls him off!”

I realized I was laughing the kind of insider’s laugh only memory can induce which perplexed them even more: they looked at each other as if they were thinking, “that’s supposed to be funny?”

“Uhm, at one point, the Hungarian says ‘My hovercraft is full of eels.’ It became a kind of greeting between us, at least for a couple of months... instead of saying hello, you know?” It was clear they had no idea why either of us should have found this amusing. “I’d forgotten all about it!”

“So he’s saying ‘hello’? Isn’t there an easier way of doing that...? Like, just writing the word ‘hello’ down?” Tony was clearly skeptical. HellOOOooooo, she seemed to be thinking.

“It’s just a way of getting my attention.”

“But he already did that, don’t you think: arm and leg out like a viola clef, writing your name on the slip of paper? And you wouldn’t have gotten THIS much if his cell phone hadn’t gone off, with that transposition clue. How could he have known it would ring just as you’re standing there reading his note?”

“How would I know – I’m not writing this, am I!?” They looked at me with considerable doubt. “Oh right, I am...”

Tony spoke first. “Speaking of that phone call, I wonder if Inspector Hemiola’s found the source of that number?”

Just then I realized something about the Python line: I could see the letters for the word “VIOLA” in it.

MY HO-V-ERCR-A-FT I-S FULL O-F EE-L-S...

I was on to something, I was sure. I began scratching away, moving some letters around to uncover the coded message. Maybe it meant something after all.

Just then, there was knock on the door, the sergeant telling us Inspector Hemiola wanted to see us. Gathering up our few things, we followed him into the hallway but rather than turning left toward the Green Room, he’d gone off to the right. Tony looked at me quizzically.

“Isn’t he still in the Green Room?”

“No. We found something else.” With that, he rapped on the door of the main dressing room. A gruff “yeah” came from inside – clearly it was not good news Hemiola had found – and the sergeant pushed the door open, allowing us to enter before him.

There was a strong odor of cheese in the room. Some of the furniture had been moved around, a chair knocked over and a glass shattered on the floor. Had there been a fight? Schnellenlauter was known to be forgetful but not clumsy. Then Hemiola stood aside and I could see writing on the tile floor of the bathroom.

It occurred to me that both Mahler and Tchaikovsky had used this bathroom, among many famous visiting maestros: it made me want to look reverently at the toilet. But it was also the room where, apparently, my friend had died. But how did his body get to the Green Room?

“Does this mean anything to you, Dr. Dick?” He had already placed a call to their cryptography department but unfortunately Agent Anna Graham was away on a summer vacation.

The three of us peered in at it. It was another Fibonacci poem, one letter per tile, the last line underlined, as it were, by the bath mat.

THINK
IN
B-FLAT
CEGUFQTJVMUNP
DIVINE PROPORTION’S
PHRASINGS OF CELESTIAL MUSIC

“Well,” said Buzz, “that would certainly explain the transposition.”

“But what’s the fourth line?” Tony wondered. “It must be another code for a three-syllable word.”

“Or words,” I said as I quickly scribbled it onto my note-pad.

“Man, I’m getting hungry. This smell of cheese makes me want to go out for some lasagna or something.” Buzz was often hungry which seemed natural in somebody only a few years past being a teenager, though I know he felt that was “long ago,” now.

“Do you still think Schnellenlauter hasn’t named his killer?” Hemiola seemed more testy now, but perhaps his patience was wearing thin as a result of finding still more clues. He motioned us back into the main part of the room. “Anything else you recognize about this room?”

Recognize, I thought: I’d never been in this room before. But then I saw it on the surface of the little table in front of the mirror. Clearly the cleaning crew had not been here, yet: a bloody finger had written “OP 45" into the dust.

“No, I don’t think we’ll find the killer’s identity here. I suspect these are further clues to WHY he was killed. I’m beginning to see some patterns here. The fourth line is clearly a coded clue, perhaps the identity of the composer who wrote an Opus 45.” I looked closer at the table and saw in the mirror that Tony was still in the bathroom and had just bent over as if picking something up. Hemiola and the sergeant had stepped closer to the outside door in a whispered huddle. Then I noticed Tony stand up with a look of shock on her face: without any comment, she stepped quietly back into the room, holding a finger to her lips. Buzz looked at her quizzically and cleared his throat again. Damn those allergies.

Hemiola turned around. “Sergeant Sforzando will take you back to the other dressing room. We have more to do here. I suspect this is where the actual murder took place, but apparently Schnellenlauter didn’t die here. Somehow he managed to leave all these clues and then wander down to the Green Room where he arranged himself as you saw him. What I want to know is why...”

“Not to mention who killed him,” Buzz added in a studiously controlled voice.

“Oh, actually, I’m beginning to think I’ve figured that out.”

“Really,” I said, more as a statement of disbelief than out of genuine curiosity. But then his cell phone rang. He was using the Ride of the Valkyries as his ring tone. How droll.

Hemiola turned his back to us and barked into the phone. “Yeah?” then “Yeah!” and finally one last, drawn-out “yeah...” as if he were thinking “verrrry interesting.” He was old enough, he might remember ‘Laugh In’ but I wasn’t going to try explaining it to my two young colleagues.

He turned around and asked us very politely if we wouldn’t mind waiting back in the other dressing room for a while. “By the way,” he added, reaching for his pad, “your real name, Dr. Dick, I don’t think we’d been officially introduced: it’s Stouffer, isn’t it?”

Before I could correct him, Tony spoke up and said “Yes! Yes, it is, how rude of me. I’m so sorry, I should have been more formal when we met – out back!” She said the last two words very deliberately.

“Ah, good,” he said, writing it down. I looked over at her and saw Buzz smiling his usual “I have no idea what’s going on” idiot’s grin and figured I’d best go along with her.

The sergeant opened the door and then followed us down the hall back to the room we’d been using earlier. Once the door was shut, I heard him lock it. “Odd,” I thought.

Tony whispered to me what she had discovered in the maestro’s bathroom. “There was one other line, covered by the shower mat. It had almost been obliterated but I could still read it: DS – GET DR. DICK.”

“You mean P.S., probably? No doubt how I'd gotten involved in all this,” I suggested helplessly.

“D.S. – your initials?” Buzz was genuinely studious in his expression.

“No, probably not – we always used my real initials, RAS, with e-mails. And what was this Stouffer business, anyway,” I asked, looking at Tony.

“Don’t you get it?” she asked. ‘GET DR. DICK’ it said. He's always asking about why he didn't just name his killer? Then he sends us back down here and locks the door?”

Slowly, her words sank into my greater consciousness and I leaned against the wall.

“You’re his suspect. He thinks YOU killed Schnellenlauter!” She looked at me intently. “We have to get out of here.”

“But I couldn’t have - I mean I have an alibi. After dinner with Jean-Claude Plusvitefort, I went to the concert and then back to the... the... hotel, whatever it’s called and...” then realized, since Buzz had gone out partying with some friends instead of taking in the concert, I was of course alone the whole evening after dinner, which meant in fact I had no alibi at all. My shoulders slumped lower against the wall and I could feel myself beginning to sink.

“Well, decipher this code, then,” Tony said, looking at me intently. “I could just barely overhear who was talking to Hemiola on his cell phone? Your friend – Maestro Plusvitefort – was just found this morning in his hotel room near Lincoln Center?”

“Yes, he’s conducting a concert performance of Berg’s ‘Lulu’ this evening at Avery Fisher and... wait, found??” Suddenly, a dingy room at the Cheap Bastard Arms seemed a lot more appealing.

“Found... murdered... shot through the heart and strangled with a viola string.”

Buzz cleared his throat. Yessir, he thought, Dr. Dick is in Deep Stuff now.

Little did he know how deep.

To be continued...

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2009

The Schoenberg Code: Chapter 1

“The Schoenberg Code” is a serial novel in 12 chapters, a parody of Dan Brown’s novel, “The Da Vinci Code,” as retold from a musical perspective by Dick Strawser. This is the first installment of the revised edition. The material is, in so far as parody is concerned, more or less original. -- Dr. Dick
= = = = = = =

The room was still deep in shadows when I was suddenly awakened by a piercing noise. Perhaps it was all part of a bad dream. No, I thought, blinking into the fading darkness, this sounded quite real. But it was the middle of the night, wasn't it? Bleary-eyed, I rolled over to shut off the alarm clock, wondering why I had set it so early when the dratted noise kept on ringing and I remembered I didn’t have an alarm clock.

Another moment passed before I realized it was the phone.

“The sun was just coming up – why would anybody be calling me at this ungodly hour?” Musicians are frequently incapable of understanding the way the rest of the world works. I picked up the phone and with a deep breath tonelessly croaked “Good morning...” It was not the voice I'd want to greet my students with, but at the moment it was the only one I could find.

“Dr. Dick?” The voice did not wait for confirmation but rattled on. “This is Chief Inspector Albert Hemiola with the International Music Police and I have a very urgent request to make of you.”

“Request?” The fog was beginning to lift slightly from my brain. He must think I work at a radio station or something. I tried to imagine why someone from the International Music Police would be calling me? Had I made some political aspersion in my 20th Century lit class relating to Charles Ives' contemptuous dismissal of his mollycoddled conservative friends who had no interest in challenging themselves with contemporary music, a remark that had been misinterpreted by one of my less than attentive students who'd then reported me to the dean for disparaging President Bush?

“No, I don’t think you understand. I’m calling from the Green Room of Carnegie Hall. You were going to meet with a conductor named... Schnellenlauter this afternoon?”

Of course, I had forgotten! It was Saturday, June 24th, my great escape to the Big Apple to take in a weekend concert at Carnegie Hall. It was 2006, a year of major anniversaries for both Mozart and Shostakovich. And here I was, slowly becoming aware of my surroundings: a hotel room in Brooklyn, not my home near the small-town college in Central Pennsylvania where I was a well-known music professor and blogger of various music-illogical inanities. On a scale of 1 to 10, I was about to show up on the chart any minute, now.

My grad assistant, Buzz Blogster, and I had found some rooms in a small hotel overlooking Manhattan – well, the hotel overlooked Manhattan, I wasn’t sure exactly what my room was overlooking: some air-shaft in the back of the building, I gathered. I could never remember the name of it but we called it the Cheap Bastard Arms.

That night, the famed Dodecaphonic Symphony Orchestra of New York had played a program of Shostakovich's 10th Symphony and Alban Berg's Violin Concerto with the Russian violinist, Vassily Skratchenitchen. Tonight, their second concert would feature Schoenberg, Boulez and Elliott Carter. I could hardly contain my excitement. My old friend Hans-Heinz Schnellenlauter, a champion of the gnarliest of gnarly 20th Century music was conducting a short two-day series that was part of their Pops Concerts called "Atonalment" that had been selling well on New York’s underground new music scene, most of its audience people who enjoyed contemporary music but were afraid to admit it to anyone else.

“We’re planning on having lunch before the concert. I haven’t seen him in years. I was at last night's concert but didn't have a chance to see him backstage.” I also thought of the young woman who was now the orchestra’s manager: her mother had been a fellow student of mine when we were at the conservatory together but had lost touch over the years. She was a cellist with a lot of self-confidence issues. Her most recent e-mails still included things like “does this font make me look fat?” It was hard to believe her daughter was now the manager of a major musical organization in New York City. It was also hard to believe her daughter was a violist, but that was another issue.

“Well, he’s... uhm... here with me now,” Inspector Hemiola said but there was a tone in his voice that made me aware that perhaps all was not well. I can be quick that way. Sometimes.

“What happened? And why are you calling me?” I was about to ask how he had found me, for that matter.

“The IMP has been called in because it is believed this is more than just a routine murder.”

Routine murder. The words echoed through my brain. Not just a murder but one that was not routine. Is that possible? But I’d read enough mysteries to realize after a while all murders begin to fit into a pattern of some kind or another. Or at least the books did. Just like music: recognizeable forms could be broken down into standard clichés that no matter how you thought you’d varied them all had some kind of common denominator. That’s what I remembered most from one of my favorite professor’s classes, back when I was still an undergraduate, how you needed to get beneath the surface of the music to find that, after all, there was always some kind of innate, underlying structure which...

The voice on the phone interrupted my thoughts.

“So if you could be ready, someone will be there shortly to pick you up. See you soon. Appreciate your help.”

“Help? What help?” But the caller had hung up and there was nothing but dial tone. Then there was a knock at the door.

“That was quick,” I mumbled to myself.

Stumbling out of bed and realizing I was soon going to need copious amounts of coffee, I made it to the door by the twelfth knock. People are too impatient: it’s the middle of the bloody night, after all, cut me a break. Then I remembered my friend, apparently murdered: how bloody can it be?

When I opened the door, it was Buzz Blogster. “Hey, Doc, somebody called me and said we’re supposed to be over at Carnegie Hall in fifteen minutes. They’re sending over a driver to pick us up.”

“Who is sending a driver? What’s this all about?” I didn’t really know how to answer my own questions. Buzz didn’t know any more than I did. He was one of those irritating 20-somethings who never seemed to be anything but bright and perky, always bubbling over with curiosity, usually a lot of fun to be around but not at 7 in the morning. Of course, he was probably out all night, enjoying New York’s party life. Me? I just looked it. Hanging out with Buzz made me feel younger, I told myself, but others probably thought I was really just another 30-something who’d led a hard life.

The driver from the IMP was waiting for us outside what passed for a lobby, the engine left running in the tiny compact car that seemed even smaller compared to all the gas-snorting soccer vans I was used to back home, the kind that could hold a live string quartet in the back instead of just a CD player. The driver was all business which was great as far as I was concerned. It was too early for small-talk. The radio was playing some 18th Century symphony by one of those faceless Mozart Wannabes, something that sounded interchangeable with one by any number of other Mozart Wannabes. I forgot, this wasn’t a cab: it was a car sent over by the International Music Police. What kind of music did I expect them to play? In a matter of seconds, it felt like we were airborne, the pilot accelerating from ♩=60 to ♩=357, an odd choice of tempo, perhaps, as we careened through the streets at what felt like warp speed, the faceless Mozart Wannabe notwithstanding.

It seemed like only minutes before we were pulling up to the back of Carnegie Hall. It was a fast ride in a short machine.

Chief Inspector Hemiola from the IMP met us. Standing beside him was a shapely young woman wearing a black pants suit with a tight-fitting silvery-looking short jacket that for some reason reminded me of Ravel. This, it turned out, was my friend’s daughter, Antoinette Avoirdupois. I figured she’d changed her name to protect her family after she'd become a violist, even though she’d gone for a math degree originally on the assumption that she could still play the viola if she wanted to but needed something realistic to pay the bills. And very clearly she didn’t need to worry about what font she was using. I could sense the attentiveness in Buzz as he stood next to me, clearing his throat as we were being introduced. If he had any thoughts of stealing the sex scenes in this story, I would have to remind him that this is my blog...

As we quickly ascended a stairway to the backstage area and I was contemplating how many times I would have to type “Antoinette Avoirdupois” in this story, she confided to us that her friends called her “Tony.” Buzz kept clearing his throat: perhaps he had allergies.

We reached the Green Room through a series of elevators and a warren of narrow hallways in the old building. I would need breadcrumbs to find my way out of here but figured the rats would have eaten them all by then. There must be an easier way: at this rate, the murderer could still be in the building, hopelessly lost. A large-framed guard, possibly once a bass-player, stood by the door, wearing the official insignia of the IMP. Everybody these days seemed to be using a slightly leaning treble clef for their logo and feeling that it said everything about music. That wasn’t a logo, I snorted to myself: that was clip-art. And it was also strangely discriminatory, as if anyone who didn’t play a treble-clef instrument was somehow not considered part of the musical tribe. Who are the International Music Police, anyway? I'd never heard of them before. The guard waved us through.

Under the glare of fluorescent lights, there was the body of my friend, stretched out on the floor. I would have recognized him easily but would prefer not to see him like this, his face and body contorted in pain, his mane of snow-white hair looking most un-maestro-like. There was a wire pulled tightly around his neck, which had turned purplish from the bruising. He clearly had been strangled, but the two holes in his shirt-front and the odd stain that emanated from them indicated he had also been shot twice in the chest.

“We’re considering this a suspicious death, of course, but we would have to wait for the official forensics report following the autopsy to be sure,” Inspector Hemiola said. “But we thought the positioning of the body rather odd. What do you make of it? We were thinking perhaps a letter K as if maybe his killer’s name began with... K.” How Kafka-esque, I thought.

His left arm stretched out above him parallel to the wall, his left leg stretched in the opposite direction, also carefully parallel to the wall. His right arm and leg were pointing outwards at odd angles, about 45 degrees, give or take. I thought he looked more like a giant alto clef (not the typical curvy kind but the one that, yeah, looks like a 'K'). It's a musical symbol that's been used to confuse musicians through the centuries. It was used almost exclusively for viola players and they’ve been bitter ever since.

“Perhaps it’s a tenor clef,” Buzz mused, thinking of possible alternatives.

If there were a red herring, Buzz would be the first to find it, I thought.

“No, look at this,” pointing to the wire that remained tightly wrapped around the dead man’s neck. “This is not just a wire. It’s a string – aluminum-wound gut would be my guess, fairly cheap at that. I think we can say he was killed by a free-lance string player, maybe a member of his orchestra, probably a grudge killing.”

“You think it was the violin soloist who’d didn't like the way his concerto had gone, so he butchered the conductor?” Buzz was always reading: he especially liked bad reviews. “And then splayed him out like this to shift the blame on to a violist?”

“It’s not for us to jump to conclusions: that’s what the news media is for. We’ll let the police do their investigation but my guess is... it was a violist. And a fairly strong one. That, I think you’ll find,” indicating the string around the conductor’s neck, “is a C-string of a viola...”

“But he was also shot in the chest. Twice! Why would somebody strangle him if they could shoot him through the heart?”

“He’s a maestro - he has no heart! The killer probably realized that too late and had to garotte him to finish him off, not realizing of course that the bile in his heart would eventually fill up his body cavity and poison the rest of him. It was a slow painful death, obviously, but it gave him time. I don’t think the killer left this message for us. I believe the victim did.”

Buzz looked around quizzically. “Message? What message?”

I knelt on the floor so my eyes could follow the sight-lines of his right arm and leg. There were pictures on the wall, as one might expect. The arm pointed to a portrait of Mozart; the leg, to one of Shostakovich. That seemed conspicuous, since it was an anniversary year for both composers: the world has been celebrating Mozart’s 250th for some time now, and Shostakovich’s centennial would take place officially in the fall. But what did that have to do with my friend? He never conducted Mozart – he always said he didn’t need to, since everybody else did, mostly badly at that – though I knew he was upset Shostakovich was being overshadowed in the season’s programming. And he had just conducted Shostakovich's 10th moments before his gruesome-looking death. But what could that have to do with it? If it hadn’t been for the left arm and leg, carefully placed parallel to the wall, I would’ve just thought he was pointing to two composers’ pictures. There must be a viola connection.

“Quick,” I asked Buzz. “What viola connections do Mozart and Shostakovich have?”

“Uhm, I hate it when you do this. Okay, Mozart liked to play the viola...”

“Right. And Shostakovich?”

“He was a pianist. But... oh, I know – his last composition was the Viola Sonata.” He was fairly beaming, he felt so clever. “People joke that viola sonatas killed both Brahms AND Shostakovich.”

“Not entirely accurate, on Brahms' behalf, mind you: they were originally clarinet sonatas. But what is he trying to tell us?”

I was lost in thought when Inspector Hemiola handed me a slip of paper. “We found this in the shirt-pocket. The one bullet narrowly missed it.”

A small folded piece of manuscript paper: on one side was scribbled a stream of letters, barely legible; on the other, a neatly printed kind of poem.

“One
Man.
Woman
Bears a child
That is not his own.
A violist knows transfigured nights.”

“It’s a fib!” Odd moment for my voice to sound oddly pleasant, I thought, at this sign of recognition.

Hemiola asked if Schnellenlauter had a habit of lying: maybe this whole thing was a bad joke?

“No, no,” I said, pointing at the lines of the poem. “It’s a poetic form based on the Fibonacci Series.”

Tony spoke up for the first time. “Where you add the numbers together to get the number of syllables of the next line. I see: 1 + 1 = 2... 1 + 2 = 3... 2 + 3 = 5... 3 + 5 = 8,” explaining it slowly for Hemiola's benefit.

But Buzz thought differently. “No, the last line is nine, isn’t it?”

“You’re pronouncing ‘violist’ as three syllables, not two: VYOH-list.” Buzz looked crestfallen after Tony corrected him in that tone of voice: he had failed in her eyes. He was reduced to my young sidekick and therefore, now, insignificant.

I turned the scrap of paper over to look at the back: my name, followed by twenty-four letters that made no sense, written in a fading red ink as if the pen was soon to run out. It was clear it must have been the last thing he had written down before he died.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier just to write down the name of his killer,” Tony said. Apparently Hemiola, who was losing his patience, agreed.

“Let’s assume he didn’t know who his killer was. But perhaps he knew why he was being killed.”

It sounded brilliant and for a few seconds the accompanying silence was stunning. I knew Schnellenlauter was always a great one for puzzles, especially musical puzzles, but it’s strange because he knew I didn’t have the mind for them. Why me?

Just then the silence was shredded by the ringing of a cell-phone. As if on the downbeat, every one else in the room reached for their pockets except me (I still didn’t have a cell phone). But they all realized it wasn’t theirs.

“It’s coming from the body,” I said calmly. “Listen to it.”

Buzz was the first to speak. “It’s a four-note musical motive. I’ve heard it before...”

Tony identified it correctly. “It’s Dmitri Shostakovich’s musical signature: D-S-C-H!”

“Correct – the pitches that spell out his initials, at least in a German translation. The ‘SH’ of Shostakovich is a single Russian character that can be transliterated into ‘SCH’ in German.”

“So...” Buzz seemed hesitant to guess but felt strongly the need to restore himself in Tony’s beautifully dark brown eyes. “That would be D... E-flat... C... er... B-natural?”

“Correct again. ‘S’ in German was really E-flat and ‘H’ was B-natural... it was an old musical code that allowed composers to write their names into their music.”

“Like Bach – B-A-C-H... the ‘B’ is really B-flat, right?”

“Very good, but there’s a problem here.” Everyone stopped. “Isn’t anyone going to answer the damn phone??”

Inspector Hemiola reached into Schnellenlauter’s pocket with his latex-gloved hand and retrieved the phone, flipping it open just as the ringing stopped. “No one’s there. We waited too long.” But he wrote down the number to have it traced, handing the slip of paper to the sergeant beside him. “Not likely it will be much of a clue: could be his wife calling to see where he is.”

“No, his wife died some years ago.” I couldn’t remember exactly when Frieda had died, a fine old opera singer long past her prime by the time I'd met her more than twenty-five years ago. I'm not sure anyone remembers Frieda F. Erden, now. It may not have been the happiest of marriages, true, but he had remained faithful to her memory, all the same. “But whoever it was gave us a valuable clue.”

“And that would be...?” Hemiola looked eagerly from one to the other, his eyebrow arching like a fermata. Neither of my colleagues seemed to notice.

“It’s not really D-S-C-H... it’s a whole tone flat. The first note was a C-natural, not a D.”

“Which means it’s really C... D-flat... B-flat... A-natural? Who the heck is that?!” Buzz sounded put out.

“No, no, I think it’s still meant to be recognized as Shostakovich’s signature, but it means we have to transpose something DOWN a whole-step.” I reached for the scrap of paper with the gibberish on it. “Get me a pad and pen, would you, Inspector? Let’s look at this.”

We went to the one small table where there were still water-ring stains from last night’s drink glasses but decided to let the IMP proceed with their work. A scene-of-crime officer had come in and began to examine the body, commenting in a bad stage-whisper that with rigor mortis this advanced they would never get him into a casket. Inspector Hemiola escorted us into one of the dressing rooms down the hall where we set up a kind of temporary office. The sergeant who had accompanied us brought in three cups of coffee that smelled, frankly, too generic to be anything but some ghastly instant brand. We’re in New York City and you mean to tell me this was all they could find? It was going to be a long day.

“What do you make of the little Fibonacci poem, Buzz? Ring any bells, Tony?”

“Well, ‘Transfigured Night’ is the famous early piece by Schoenberg. It tells the story of the couple walking in the moonlight when the woman tells her boyfriend that the child she’s going to have isn’t his.”

Buzz continued the thread. “Right, but he says that’s okay because he loves her and they will raise the child together. But the line says ‘A violist knows transfigured nights’ – Schoenberg wasn’t a violist, was he?” He sounded kind of tentative.

“Actually, he played the cello, but Schnellenlauter played the viola, at least when he first started his career.”

“He did?” Tony seemed suddenly intrigued. “He never mentioned that to me.”

“Do you think his wife was pregnant with another man’s child when they were married?”

“I know their daughter was born... well, shortly after they’d been married, but I never considered it might not have been his daughter.” I settled down at the dressing table, noticing Tony’s reflection in the mirror and how little she reminded me of her mother. But she did look vaguely familiar: I just couldn't think of who. I also noticed how Buzz kept stealing glances at her, but I let it pass. “It was one of those little scandals in the arts world that no one really was too shocked by, after all. I think I read about it in the paper somewhere, but he never mentioned it. Now, let’s see what we can find here.”

I wrote out the string of very carefully spaced letters he’d written down.

K R J Y C A M C J M D W G Q D C P D P J T S F Q

“Not very promising,” Tony said sadly. “What do you make of that?”

“Not many musical pitches. Doesn’t look like anything to me.” Buzz sounded resigned to failure, already.

“I’m sure Schnellenlauter would not have taken the time to write this down if it didn’t mean something. Let me try something: if I transpose each letter down a whole step – remember the ring tone? That would be two letters… maybe it will spell out something more obvious.” I began to scribble onto my scratch-pad.

“Wait,” Buzz interrupted. “Are you transposing up or down? If the ring-tone was starting on a C but it should be a D, shouldn’t you be transposing up? That would be the written pitch, after all.” Buzz didn’t have to remind me he’d played alto saxophone in school and was all over the transposition thing.

“Okay, you’re right!” I scratched out what I’d already started and began a new series.

M T L A E C O E L O F Y I S F E R F R L V U H S

Sitting back in my chair, I sighed heavily. “That doesn’t help much, does it.” Then it occurred to me, “Wait, maybe it’s a retrograde – you know, backwards?” I held it up to the mirror and we all three peered at it hopefully. But again, it made no sense. I took a sip of the coffee which, frankly, tasted no more rewarding than our clue and as uninviting as it had smelled, but it was better than nothing. Equally frankly, I was beginning to feel a strong need for something to eat.

It was then I remembered a conversation from years ago, not long after I’d first met the Maestro, perhaps thirty years ago, now. Schnellenlauter and I were sitting at a table of a sidewalk café near Columbus Circle one beautiful spring day. While I could even remember that he had complained about how weak the coffee was, I tried to get to the heart of something he’d been talking about. It was something about… about a code he had discovered, something…

“Aha! Now I remember it,” I blurted out. “He called it the rule of… the Rule of 12, of course! Obvious, for a serialist: how could I forget? You take every 12th letter…” and I began scribbling furiously, counting letter by letter. In a short time, I had what seemed to make more sense.

M Y H O V E R C R A F T I S F U L L O F E E L S

The look of satisfaction on each of our faces quickly changed to dismay. Clearly, Dr. Dick had his work cut out for him.

To be continued...

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2009

Mendelssohn & Schoenberg, Oh My...

Though the mystique of “a long weekend” has long been lost on me since the days I was unceremoniously retired, “Labor Day” strikes me as something that might seem nostalgic to many people in today's economic reality.

Much of this weekend has been spent laboring away on posts over at Mendelssohn's World, the educational outreach part of a musical program for Harrisburg School District's John Harris High School. The performance of Mendelssohn's music with Odin Rathnam and the West Branch Music Festival takes place on September 16th.

The first West Branch Music Festival takes place this month, with their Mendelssohn Program this Sunday at 4pm. They'll be playing along the banks of this river (see right) - Odin may go fishing during intermission - and then coming down to Harrisburg to play the program for 9th & 10th grade students at Harrisburg High School.

(They'll be doing a second program along the West Branch the next weekend.)

Then, too, the first of my brief courses as part of Harrisburg Area Community College's continuing education program comes up starting September 17th, so it's gonna be a busy month for Dr. Dick...

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

After writing and posting a series of “study questions” on Mendelssohn this morning, I calculated I've written over 45,296 words about Mendelssohn in the last 11 days.

National Novel Writing Month – a program that tries to cajole you into writing a novel during the month of November – has a goal of 50,000 words in 30 days.

AND... I'm getting ready to start posting the revised edition of THE SCHOENBERG CODE starting tomorrow, another 47,000 words or so... Fortunately, it's already written, just waiting for one last editing run-through before I start posting it on the installment plan tomorrow!

Yes, it's a serial novel. In 12 chapters. And why, yes, it involves a serial killer. Funny you should ask, because serial composer Arnold Schoenberg is only one aspect of the plot.

And yes, it's a parody of Dan Brown's “Da Vinci Code.” (In case you haven't heard, he has a new book coming out next week called “The Lost Symbol.”)

Dan Brown's earlier book had been on the Best Seller Lists for like ever, so when the movie was about to be released three years ago, I thought it was high time to read the book. The result? An idea for writing a parody.

I retold the plot in ways that mirror certain similar secrets in a musical context. As one person described it, “Pulp Fiction for Music Geeks,” though I don't think you have to be a music geek to enjoy the parody though it might help with many of the bad puns throughout.

At the moment, I'm feeling a little too brain-fried to be posting much more, here, so let's call it a day and

Getting People to Listen

I'm not talking about Health Care or getting a state budget passed in Pennsylvania. In this case, it's getting people to listen to “classical music.”

As I get ready to return to the class-room with the Mendelssohn Outreach Project or classes I'm offering at the Harrisburg Area Community College, I've been rereading a 1993 article by John Steinmetz that first appeared in the NARAS Journal that summer. It's been reprinted, re-posted and circulated by e-mail many times since then. I recently received it from a musician friend in New York City and I dutifully sent it on to other friends of mine – fellow composers and musicians, music teachers and music presenters as well as music-lovers.

It's called “Resuscitating Art Music” whether it's Bach, Coltrane, Shankar or Zwilich and part of the problem is defining “what is Art Music.”

Terminology has always been a sticking point. When I was teaching in college many (many) years ago, one of my roommates was working with a high school music teacher who told her class “classical music is the kind of music people don't like.”

Even “classical music” is hard to define: it is always opposed to “popular music” (Art Culture VS. Pop Culture). From the Pop perspective, then, “classical music” would be “Unpopular Music” so perhaps this teacher back in the '70s wasn't far from wrong.

It has been called “serious music” as if the latest rock stars aren't serious about what they're writing and performing...

When the Beatles were new and my parents' generation was horrified at their dress and hair-styles as much as their music, “classical music” was called “Long-Hair Music,” looking at pictures of composers like Beethoven and Franz Liszt, for instance. Of course, once Rock Music's hair-styles gotten even longer and wilder, the term disappeared.

The sound of “Art Music” makes it seem like it should be pronounced “Aaaht Music” and be accompanied with a condescending nod of the tiara (no offense to friends from Boston who actually talk that way, naturally). It became a class thing, nothing to do with classical or popular. Aaaht was the domain of the wealthy – Popular was (ewww) nasty and plebeian. Didn't these guys write for royalty, anyway?

But I like John Steinmetz's definition which he admits is, like most simple definitions, an oversimplification. Art Music is music that requires you to pay attention to it.

Popular Music doesn't require that. He mentions a student who said, in comparing a 14th Century piece with a favorite rock song, “I like rock music because you don't have to pay attention in order to get it.”

It's not the attention SPAN, one thing many, generally older people worry about in the younger generations – being able to concentrate on a sentence of more than 7 words – but the ability to concentrate at all, to focus on something that might be rewarding.

In this sense, Steinmetz says, he's defining not the music (or any other art form) but the listener (or any other form of “art consumer,” to borrow a particularly nasty term of marketing demographics).

But perhaps “consumer” isn't so bad after all: for many of us, Art is as important to our lives as food and water. The problem, then, is getting that concept across to people who aren't paying attention.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

So, he says, let's assume art music “requires conscious attention and some experience in order to be understood.” He says this can apply to many different kinds of music whether they're from different cultures or different levels of sophistication and style. Mainly, in his sense and mine, it's Western European Classical Music.

He uses the term “consume” in the sense that art music requires listeners who want to do more than that. Speaking in terms of demographics, much of it was intended for an audience of musicians, either professional or amateur. In the days of Mozart and Mendelssohn, most middle-class people knew how to play the piano or sing, maybe play the violin. Even some royalty were amateur musicians: King Frederick the Great was a good flutist and an adequate composer; his nephew, not a great king, played the cello though one assumes any comments about his playing may not have been thoroughly honest. The Austrian emperor, Joseph II, who once accused Mozart of writing “too many notes,” enjoyed playing the harpsichord.

More typical of the audience in those days was a family that lived in Vienna in the early 1800s. The father was a poor school teacher but he enjoyed playing the cello. Three of his sons played the violin. One of them showed an early talent for composing and since he could also play the viola, the family would entertain themselves sitting around after dinner by playing string quartets. Some of those pieces were composed by one of the sons, the one named Franz Schubert.

Not because there was nothing on TV, but because there was no TV or any other form of “passive entertainment provider.” It was very much a do-it-yourself age.

Today, kids gather in garages and form their own bands. It's rarely a generational after-dinner gathering, but much of the idea is the same: they play their favorite music themselves and they write their own. They have aspirations of becoming rock stars but usually end up becoming business executives or teachers.

The only problem with this approach is the implication Mozart only wrote for other musicians. This is a complaint leveled at 20th Century composers, too: only a musician could understand this stuff. It makes it too esoteric when that's not the intent.

A composer has to first reach the musicians because that's the only way a composer is going to reach an audience. A piece of music isn't going to reach a listener like a book is going to reach a reader: a novelist doesn't need someone to read his latest book to a new audience, though we've come to that, now, with audio books – listening to a book for people who are too busy to read. You plop it into the CD-player and listen while you're in the car or sit there while... what, reading the newspaper? Aside from people who are sight-challenged, I could understand using it on long-drives or for the daily stuck-in-traffic commutes, but sitting in your living room? Well, laziness aside, that's another issue...

Being a musician makes a person more open to discovery in a piece that requires attention. There's an old saying “the more you know about it, the more you'll appreciate something.” It doesn't mean you have to know every tiny detail about how it's constructed, how this chord moves to this chord, but understanding that helps you better appreciate the final result. When friends make fun of me because I don't understand the finer details of computer programming or how a six-cylinder combustion engine works, I usually respond “I can drive a car without needing to know how to rebuild the engine – but I know how to write a symphony.” Unfortunately, that logic doesn't hold much water with non-musicians.

Steinmetz goes on to say that the attitude toward art music in this country (the United States, for my foreign readers) is not the same as it is in Europe where the tradition – as most European traditions do – goes back much further.

This was never so clear to me as the time I walked into a church in England to sing part of a concert there on the first leg of a college concert choir tour, the summer of 1970. The part we were standing on was the original floor of the church which, in a couple of years, would be celebrating its 1,000th Anniversary. I kept thinking “in a few more years, Americans will be going crazy over a 200-year-old bell with a crack in it...” It kind of spoiled some of the impact of the impending 1976 Bicentennial, especially when people would fuss about how long ago that was.

It's not like I'd never thought about how old things were. I mean, I knew some of the buildings I'd seen pictures of were older than when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but actually standing on the floor of a church that had been in place almost a thousand years...? That was, as kids say today, “awesome!”

Another thing Steinmetz points out is the American penchant for “how much does that cost?” It's not just looking for a bargain but the financial Bottom Line has become a very real thing in the arts.

A concert is a success not because of how well it was played or how the audience liked it: it is important how much money it made in ticket sales.

When you look at the movie rankings from last weekend, you see they're ranked by how much they earned at the box-office. It has nothing to do with the quality of the movie or even whether all those people liked it after they'd bought their tickets. If your movie wasn't on the Top 5 or Top 10 list, it must not have been very good. If you like to follow the off-beat, independent films, you might not even know they exist until they appear at the little hole-in-the-wall Arts Cinema you'd be attending regularly to see any of the films you like.

If you're going to “get” anything out of the experience of art music, you're not going to get it by paying for it – for the ticket or the CD, yes, but not for the experience of listening to it. That takes a little something extra.

It costs attention.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

I went to a Gretna Music concert recently with some challenging new music on it – including the world premiere of a piece for violin and percussion by a Malaysian composer I'd never heard of before. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever heard anything by any Malaysian composer before. The Momenta Quartet played a program that paired Kee-yong Chong's “Suspended Love” (a world premiere) with a slightly older piece by Luciano Berio for viola and percussion which included a tape-recording of a Sicilian street-vendor (folk music, it was called, but not the kind of folk music you might expect: this was raw and primitive, about as far removed from the concert stage as you could get). On the 2nd half of the program was a string quartet by Robert Schumann.

The audience was beyond small. The Schumann didn't bring them in, the fact nobody really knows who Momenta is (are?) didn't help – and a world premiere plus a work with tape? As Yogi Bera would've put it, “they stayed away in droves.”

Curiously, most of the people there actually seemed to enjoy it. Nobody walked out. Everybody I could see looked pretty attentive, not bored or uncomfortable. Everyone was applauding, some vociferously.

Because there had been some noise issues – the extremely delicate ending had been drowned out by a passing plane – it was agreed they should do “Suspended Love” again, at the end of the concert. Anyone who wanted to stay, could.

True, over half the audience left while the stage was reset. But those that stayed certainly enjoyed hearing it again – or at least hearing all of it. There were new things to hear, things you heard differently - not to mention hearing it after having heard some, by comparison, pretty tame Schumann.

Among those standing at the end were a few of the young people in the audience and a number of “senior citizens” (one of them in her 90s), people you'd stereotypically assume were more conservative in their tastes.

So if everyone seemed to enjoy it once if not twice, why is the audience so small when you announce there's a new piece on the program or there's a composer most people associate with unpleasantness (poor Schoenberg)?

Lots of people came to hear the world premiere of a violin sonata by Philip Glass with Market Square Concerts earlier this year. A recently premiered percussion concerto by Jennifer Higdon was on a program with the Harrisburg Symphony in 2007 and the audience “went wild” - you'd think it had been some chestnut by Tchaikovsky, the way the audience applauded and cheered!

But drawing them into the concert hall to hear the music in the first place is the challenge. Too many people assume “I'm not going to like this music” because it's boring or it's new or, more typically, it's just unfamiliar.

A friend once asked me why the Harrisburg Symphony had programmed Dvořák's 7th Symphony. “Why aren't they doing the New World?” It was more popular and would sell more tickets. She didn't know the piece and automatically assumed it wasn't as good.

“Do you like Dvořák's New World?” I asked her.

“Yes!” she replied with that “of course” tone-of-voice, challenging my sanity.

“Then you should like the 7th: they're by the same composer. Try it.”

Later, this same person asked me why the orchestra had programmed excerpts from an opera by Mussorgsky that you don't often get a chance to hear.

“Is there any good music in Boris Godunov?”

After telling her it was one of my favorite operas, I suggested she come and hear it. She did. I passed her on the way backstage and she said “Wasn't that just wonderful!?!”

A couple of years ago, someone asked me – when we were trying to figure out what to include in a list of the “most famous” (not necessarily best) pieces of classical music, I had mentioned adding Beethoven's 7th Symphony to the 5th and 9th that were already there.

He said “I know Beethoven's 5th and I know Beethoven's 9th: why do I need to know Beethoven's 7th?”

And it was clear that “because it's a great piece” wasn't a good enough argument.

If you can't expose people who already like art music to other art music that's unfamiliar to them, how are you going to convince people who've never heard it before to take a chance on it, much less buy a ticket or a CD and enjoy it?

More to come...

- Dr. Dick